Friday, October 2, 2015

PALMYRA PORTRAIT PROJECT

Palmyran funerary sculpture is the largest corpus of portrait sculpture
in the Roman world outside Rome, which makes this group of material
extremely significant both in relation to issues of identity in the
Roman provinces as well as in comparison to core-Roman portraiture
studies. Both are facts which have been completely ignored in
scholarship until now. There are more than 1500 pieces scattered through
various museums and private collections across the world. These have
never been collected, catalogued and treated as a single corpus. The
aims of this project are therefore threefold: to compile a corpus of all
known palmyran funerary portraits, to digitalise the H. Ingholt-archive
and to produce text volumes to accompany the corpus as well as a number
of publications on various aspects of palmyran sculpture. The corpus
and the archive will be made available online. To achieve these goals
effectively this project must be undertaken by a group of researchers at
various stages in their careers.

3 comments:

The numbers is out of date, Chuck: more than 2600 portraits are now included in the PPP. More info in my recent blog post http://judithweingarten.blogspot.nl/2015/09/happier-days-in-palmyra-part-ii.html

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.